even if the sun falls
by lydiamaartin
Summary: She thinks that if she's going to die, this is a pretty damn good way to do it. Spencer, after Toby. - NoelSpencer.


**disclaimer:** i don't own pretty little liars.

**dedication:** for hope (quantumesque) because she's awesome and has great taste in pairings (and also i promised her this before the new year so that she'd write me one of my favorite pairings heh)

**notes:** if you haven't seen all of season 3A, might not want to read this. also there's a lot of sex, but nothing graphic.

* * *

There was a boy, gentle and handsome and so beautifully tragic in her arms, and she loved him, and when the truth breaks and her world collapses, she lies very still on her bed and she breathes and, slowly, oh, slowly, in the hazy light of the moon from her dreams, she lets herself fall apart until she is nothing except her breaths and her memories and the ghosts of her past.

;;

"Spencer," says someone, but she's not sure of anything except hands light on her back and fingers weaving through her curls as she lies there, breathing in, out, in out, as the sun rises and sinks, rises and sinks. "Spencer, you'll be all right. It'll be okay. I'm sorry, Spencer, I'm sorry."

A friend, no, more than a friend, her _brother_, she thinks, and for the first time in an eternity, she opens her eyes and her heartbeat is steady as he cradles her in his arms and apologizes again and again for not protecting her, for not saving her, for not being there.

She wants to tell him to stop blaming himself because this is her fault, _her fault_, how could she have been so _stupid_, but the words get caught and die before they can reach her lips, and before she knows it, he has to leave, and then the shadows creep around the edges of her vision and she dreams in black and red and screams for it to stop.

;;

A full moon later, she finds herself lost inside another house from another life, except she's been here before, when she was younger and lovelier and unbroken, so sure of herself and of her world. There's a party, there are glasses filled with alcohol, there are warm bodies interlinked around her, and then there is her, lonely and desperately cold and waiting for days that will never come again.

;;

There is a boy, tall and whole and bright-eyed, a boy whose world remains unshattered, and he finds her at her darkest and her lowest, when she is curled up in a ball in the corner of his room and there's blood on her fingers, but oh, there's nothing sinister here, detective. Just a girl and a broken heart and a life half-lived and haunted by skeletons from beyond the grave.

;;

He stays, and he cleans.

;;

His hands are terribly warm and terribly gentle as they wrap around hers, dabbing a tissue at the blood, and he's not looking at her for once, but she can't look away. He's close, far too close, and all she really wants to do is yell at him to get away because she's dangerous, she's _dangerous_, she breaks everything she touches, but he won't leave. Her whole world is tilting upside down, and still, he won't look at her.

;;

"Why are you doing this?"

Half a smirk, half a lie. "You're bleeding in my room, Spencer. What do you expect me to do, leave you here to cut yourself again?"

"I didn't do it on purpose."

Head tilts. Breathe. "No, but you wanted to."

;;

She wants to fight so desperately, needs to feel that electricity coursing through her veins, and he is here and he is warm, and he's touching her like she's _worth_ something. Her hands, still cut open from that stupid glass vase, fist in his shirt and the still-drying blood starts to stain it. She wants him to notice, wants him to snap, but he doesn't, he just smiles, and _god, _she hates him except she doesn't, except she can't feel anything at all.

;;

"You're making a mistake," he tells her, as if he actually cares, but from the way he's kissing her back, hot and heavy and hands everywhere, she knows he doesn't. She's a pretty girl and she's so alone and he's here and it works, if only for a second, if only it could last. But impermanence is the only permanent thing in her life, so she kisses him and aches to feel again.

;;

The sheets of his bed feel nice on her bare skin, and that's the last thing she notices before she falls asleep, her whole body curled into his like a love song.

;;

He's still there when she wakes up, bleary-eyed and heart pounding, and his eyes are dark and filled with desire, and she thinks that if she's going to die, this is a pretty damn good way to do it.

;;

The next day at school, he's up against his locker, flirting with some girl (where's Jenna, she thinks first, and second, where are her friends?), but he catches her eye across the crowded hallway and it almost seems like her world is righted for just one moment. Because here's a boy, handsome and dark, and he loves her so well in the night, and maybe she can delude herself into thinking that's all she wants and all she ever needed.

;;

"I can see why Cavanaugh picked you out of your little group of friends," he says with his trademark smirk when she meets him in the locker room after school on a day where it feels like everything is pulling her apart and she had almost forgotten what normal looked like until she saw him standing there.

"Oh?" she says as if she's back to being normal, as if she ever could be again. He buys it, though, or maybe he doesn't and maybe he's just pretending, but he doesn't press her and he doesn't look concerned at all. It's an almost refreshing change. Almost.

"Yeah, you're pretty good in bed," he says, his voice dropping until it's like a secret, another one for her to keep and clutch against her heart. She wants to laugh, but she doesn't. The charade can't go on without her, after all.

"Pretty good," she repeats instead, and before they can continue pretending like she's insulted or that he's actually trying to get under her skin, she launches herself forward and kisses him until her lips are raw.

;;

He doesn't ask why, the unspoken spoken through lips and without words. His hands are rougher today, but she supposes she's rough enough these days to handle it. Touches like silken secrets in the night are a thing of the past, locked away in a cell like the love that carried them, and this is here and now and today.

This is her world, shaky and shadowed and spinning in the wrong direction, but she will live in it if it's the last thing she does. She was never one for giving up.

;;

"What are you doing, Spencer?"

"Are you okay, Spencer?"

"Noel Kahn, really, Spencer?"

;;

He is an escape, nothing more, nothing less, she says and tattoos the message onto the drumbeat of her heart as if that will do any good. He keeps her warm and safe at night, and when the morning dawns and she sees him at school, he is nothing but someone else to talk to, go through the motions, lather, rinse, repeat. A face she recognizes, a voice that touches her bones, a touch that rights her world, nothing more, nothing less.

;;

Everyone tries their very best to make her stop, to pull her back, to save her, as if she is a damsel in distress and everyone is fighting over who can be her hero. One by one, Hanna, Aria, Emily, even Caleb and Paige and Ezra, they try and they try and they fail. There is a difference between being hurt and being broken, and as long as her dreams are haunted with blood, she thinks it might just be impossible for her to be whole again.

Jason is the first one to ask her how she honestly feels about it all. They're in his house, which is the only place she feels safe these days, as long as he's there with a blanket and a cup of coffee and his quiet, gentle words on her heartbeat.

"Are you just doing this to feel something?" he asks her when she finds all the words she wants to say to him dying on her lips. His hands wrap around hers, soft and light, not warm, just solid, and she clutches them like a lifeline.

"I think so," she says, her voice barely above a whisper. For all she knows, she could be talking to a dream again, except her dreams are never so sweet as this. "He – he helps me, Jason. Fighting and kissing and touching him…"

"I know," he says with a smile that's got a hundred tragedies inside, "I know, Spencer."

It takes her a moment to realize that the last time he had a sister her age, she died.

;;

"How long," he says in a voice that is slow like his breathing when he's sleeping as he puts his clothes back on, agonizingly slow, "are you going to keep this up, Spencer?" In the morning light, he is soft around the edges, muted, somehow, as if the dawn has blunted his sharp wit and sharper gaze.

She sits on her bed and watches him for a moment, clutching the sheets close to her and counting down the minutes until he gives up on her and leaves. He always does, because at his core, he is like everybody else, just another boy in the masses, just another life out of many. Handsome and smart, maybe, and not a traitor, probably, but still just another boy.

This time, though, he pulls on his shirt and turns back around to face her, gaze steady, steady, steady. Breathe. He steps forward, once, twice, three times, and then he's in front of her, not touching her, just looking. And she is beautiful, but she is broken, so she holds the sheets tighter, not out of modesty because he has already seen everything, but more for safety, for warmth, for the semblance of normality, for the sake of pretending.

"You're a fucking mess, you know that, don't you?" he tells her, his breathing rough again now, and then his lips crash onto hers like a memorial to all her mistakes, as if she is someone worth kissing, someone worth loving, someone worth _being_.

She pushes him away and says, "Don't do this, Noel," as if a universe exists where she doesn't want him to.

;;

She wants to scream, but she doesn't. She won't. She can't. He holds her in the nights, even still, even now, and promises her it'll be all right. It won't, it can't, but her dreams are sweet these days.

;;

When she finally finds the bitterness buried beneath the heartbreak to visit his cell, he looks haggard, almost as haunted as she, with a loneliness in his eyes and a hopelessness in the way he reaches for her as she moves forward.

"I miss you," he breathes, coughs, chokes. His fingers curl around the cold metal of his bar cells, knuckles turning white. She imagines those hands wrapped around her once again and a shiver dances down her spine. He might be lonely, but he is not alone.

"It's still going on, isn't it?" she asks, wishing she had the strength to scream in his face, but her voice is hollow and her breath is caught somewhere between her lungs and her heartbeat and the way he used to hold her, once upon a time.

"I'm sorry, Spencer," he says, as if this makes up for anything. She walks away, and it's the only thing she's proud of all year.

;;

The night she receives her acceptance letter to the University of Pennsylvania, she turns up on his doorstep in the middle of a rainstorm, soaked to the bones right through her black coat and white dress, and he opens the door, shirtless and sleepy, and she says, "I love you."

She doesn't, of course she doesn't, but she holds the words fast against his pounding heart as she kisses him and kisses him and kisses him until the storm melts into memories, into childhood dreams, into mysteries, and his hands are warm against her helplessly cold skin as they peel her clothes off one by one by one.

"You need something hot," he tells her and tries to disentangle her limbs from his to go light the fireplace or make her coffee or do something else equally stupid. But she holds him closer and tells him there is nothing she wants less than to play make believe with him because this is not a love story, this is not even love at all. This is a girl and a boy, one broken and one not, and sensations that leave her breathless in all the wrong ways.

That's it, she insists, that's all. He pours her a glass of vodka instead.

;;

He is nothing but a boy, a ghost from her memories, a touch echoing in her dreams. She goes away to university and she breathes.

* * *

**a/n: **i may or may not have written the majority of this at three in the morning, whoops. if you read this far, please drop me a review and tell me what you thought!

and **DON'T** favorite without reviewing, please and thank you!


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